The Agony of Formatting

[TactualRain]

Hey all.

I’m working on releasing a new book, and it’s at the delicate compile-for-proof phase. I’m having trouble with chapter headings.

My chapters / section folders in Scrivener don’t have pleasant names - they might be something like “Bob kills Mary” or “Do you need this 22.” When I released my last book, it was easy enough when using the Formatting section in the compile tab to just omit the title and viola - you get a nice ToC with “Chapter-One” and so on.

The snarl comes in when trying to add a section for Acknowledgements. Books have the option for “front matter” but not “back matter.” The way I solved this before was to create a level 1 document with the title “Acknowledgements” and then during compile a) omit title on level 1 folders but b) include title on level 1 text.

That was a year ago - this trick no longer seems to work. When I try and compile the work, the preview in Formatting correctly shows that it would include the title, but the compiled version (for Kindle) does not.

Is this a bug, or a feature? How do I fix it? Is there another way of adding back matter?

Thanks

[AmberV]

Check to see if the file has “Page Break Before” set on it, same as you would most likely need to do for anything in the front matter, of course. The only other thing I can think of is “Compile As-Is”. That would suppress the title, but it should also not highlight from the Formatting pane, so I’m not sure if that’s it.

[TactualRain]

Ok, I think I’ve solved it.

The problem was that the default ebook formatting options do not correctly include “level 1” but only “level 1+” - here is what you get for a print book:

Here is what you get for a default ebook:

You need to add a new layer to get it sorted.

[AmberV]

Yes, that’s true. The starting settings for a preset are just there as an example. Unless you wrote your outline precisely the way they assume, they will probably need to be adjusted to have different settings and maybe even different level arrangements.